The Cave Again; or, God is a Couchpotato Geek.

I’m a Matrix fan. If I’m trying to be more accurate I should probably say I was a Matrix fan. If the current re-hash of worn-out philosophical concepts keeps resurfacing I might not be one anymore. A good friend forwarded me a link to yet another philosopher, with yet another theory concerning the unknowability of the realness of life the other day, possibly because he knew of my fondness for the Matrix. There might have been another reason, but frankly I would prefer to think it was because of that.

The link was to a NY Times article, but for those of you who don’t have a login for NYT, you might try this link instead. I find most of these hypotheses so laughable it’s hard to even summon the willpower to counter them, but I think I’ll try, just this once, to summon the requisite energy and present the case that is quite obvious to me.

Always, always, always those philosophers who want to convince us that we cannot control our world or even our own lives will invent some way to explain away the helplessness that we all supposedly feel when faced with cold hard truth. Invariably they will offer up some variation on The Cave (a favorite amongst SF writers) and pretend that none of us can turn around to see the world that really exists; that we cannot know reality.

In this particular instance, Mr. Bostrom offers up the Matrix-like computer simulation as his variation of shadows on the cave wall; a simulation capable of mimicking an entire world of people, clueless as to their existence in a simulation, on some yet to be invented computer system 50 years or so into our future.

As far as predicting the future goes, I’m still waiting for my personal flying car that I was promised by the futurists back in the fifties. I’m not holding my breath, but it doesn’t stop me from wanting one. I don’t think we know what the future holds, can know what the future holds. So it is all fine and good to project current computer trends into the future and suggest that some day we’ll have the computing power to simulate the entire universe just for the purpose of simulating a universe.

This theory of Bostrom’s has quite a few holes in it, as unoriginal as the theory is. To start with, the simulation would not only have to include every person, but every visible bit of matter in the sky. As I said, you would have to simulate the entire universe. Why? It’s quite simple. For the simulation to be flawless, undetectable to the sim or sims residing in it, you would have to plan for every eventuality. Space based telescopes to view distant objects in the universe, for example. Or perhaps electron microscopes for examining the atom, at the other end of the spectrum. True, you could falsify the data for individual sims, but what would be the purpose of creating a sim that interacts with no one and exists only to be lied to about what is real? The satisfaction of deceiving your own creation? A serious investment of time to no real purpose. No, the purpose of running simulations (even in games like The Sims and Simcity) is to discover the results of complex interactions between sims and the effects of external stimuli; in other words, you would need to have several autonomous sims interacting in a world that would be indistinguishable from the real world, which places you squarely back at simulating the entire universe.

Yes, it might be possible some day to create such a complex simulation; but ask yourself, what purpose would it serve to simulate the entire universe? Better to program your sims not to question what lies beyond the window, or above the sky. This would save millions (probably even billions) of terabytes of data, and would radically simplify the simulation, making it potentially possible to program the simulation within a person’s lifespan. This is the other end of the problem that never gets addressed when these sorts of suggestions come up; who or what programs these simulations, and how long it would take. I daresay the programming time to accurately simulate the entire universe down to the individual atoms would roughly equate to the amount of time it has taken the universe to evolve in the first place.

All of that aside, clearly we can and do question what is outside the window, above the blue sky, what matter is made up of, etc.; so we are obviously not in a simulation. And if we are in a simulation programmed by a post-human that simulates the entire universe, how is that post-human distinguishable from god?

In other words, what Mr. Bostrom has created is an overly complex way of saying it’s God’s will. And it’s not much of an original thought when viewed from that perspective.

I think it bears pointing out that in The Cave, Plato allows one of the slaves to escape, because the allegory is an exploration of the interaction between the slave who has been free, and has a heightened understanding of what reality is, and the slaves still imprisoned in the cave. The purpose of the experiment is to explore the interaction between the different beliefs about what is real; and how easily deceived we are when it comes to the subject of belief. Even in the original allegory of the cave, no accommodation is made for the feeding and care of the slaves, or how this care takes place without the slaves becoming wise to the freedom of those who care for them; which would raise questions about the nature of the reality they were confined to. Again, curiosity and exploration would lead to questions that reveal the lie of the shadows; just as the Matrix is revealed to be nothing more than a sham to those willing to question it’s reality.

An allegory should not be taken literally. Plato’s cave questions the reliability of our natural senses, wondering what is hidden behind the limited visible spectrum; a question science has answered to a large extent today. The Matrix questions social interactions of the modern age, hypothesizing that there is a greater force than we realize at work behind the scenes. That the film goes on to literally find us plugged in to a simulation controlled by machines from which there is no escape is not the purpose behind the question. The purpose, in my interpretation, is for us to question what does govern our social interactions; what is the meaning of the endless wars, why is there a driving need to consume? Why should we lead meaningless, faceless lives that we do not believe in? Isn’t it better to throw off the chains and face the unknown, than to stare placidly at the cave wall and accept the musings of the equally clueless slave next to you?

My answer is obviously yes, face the unknown. I can’t speak for you, and your mileage may vary.

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Author: RAnthony

I'm a freethinking, unapologetic liberal. I'm a former CAD guru with an architectural fetish. I'm a happily married father. I'm also a disabled Meniere's sufferer.
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I just read what you had to say about the virtual universe idea and that’s a good debunking of one version of it. But what I was taking a little more seriously was a reality simulator that wouldn’t have a god/programmer interacting or even necessarily observing every sim and atom. Just run the thing on auto-pilot based on physical law and let the complexity build up on its own. In such a simulator it wouldn’t be practical to go about life any differently whether you’re conscious of this or not. And I don’t believe it means reality can’t be known. Sure it can. Virtual world or not.

I also imagined that such a simulator would not need to calculate every atom in the universe or even on the earth itself, just like when playing half-life, every pixel does not have to be processed unless you walk close enough to an object to observe such detail. I wouldn’t think of it as misleading. Simply making more or less detailed approximations of what happens in the universe on various scales when necessary. I’m starting to lose my confidence that what I am typing making sense so I better stop now. Obviously I have not really thought that much about this.

It hurts to think too much about this type of stuff. I generally just apply Occam’s razor and ask “to what purpose?” most of these theories fall into the realm that I was speaking to; they are attempts to dissuade the general public from attempting to think for themselves. In the same category as religion, IMHO.

Good argument, BTW. I still think the fraud would be detectable, so we are in agreement, I guess. And we are still talking about billions of terabytes of data. I just don’t think it will be feasible from a technological standpoint.

Watch the film called The 13th Floor. It’s a pretty good SciFi flick, I’ve got it on DVD. I don’t want to give too much away, but you should recognize some concepts used in that film that relate to this philosopher’s (and reporter’s) specific arguments. Almost as if they had seen the film…